In his State of the Word keynote, @matt announced that WordPress 3.7 and 3.8 will be developed simultaneously. Trunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision. would represent 3.7, while for 3.8, potential new features would be developed first as plugins. (3.8 starts at 35:00 in the video.)
This “features as plugins” method* will allow teams to conceptualize, design, and fully develop features before landing them in core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. This removes a lot of the risk of a particular feature introducing uncertainty into a release (see also 3.6, 3.5, 3.4 …) and provides ample room for experimentation, testing, and failure. As we’ve seen with MP6, the autonomy given to a feature team can also allow for more rapid development. And in a way, 3.7 provides a bit of a buffer while we get this new process off the ground.
As announced at WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. San Francisco, Matt is leading the 3.8 release. He identified MP6 as a likely candidate for 3.8, along with the Twenty Fourteen theme. WP 3.7 will be released in October, at which point we’ll begin short window (probably two to three weeks) for any features to be merged for 3.8. If a feature isn’t ready for release by this point in the development cycle, it doesn’t land in core and moves to the next release. The target for WordPress 3.8 is early December.
On August 8 at 18:00 UTC, Matt will host a WordPress 3.8 meeting in #wordpress-dev on Freenode.
Thursday’s meeting is a great time to propose features that you’re interested in working on, keeping in mind they may or may not make it into WordPress 3.8. But keep in mind an early December timeline sets up WordPress 3.9 to kick off no later than January. Bring your ideas and thoughts as 3.8 development begins!
To recap this post and the previous 3.7 post:
* Yes, this is more or less “feature branches,” but our rich plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party architecture makes it an obvious choice to follow the plugin-based model set by MP6. We have built features in plugins before — distraction-free writing in 3.3, the customizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. in 3.4, and media in 3.5 all started as plugins. But they were pegged to a specific development cycle and did not have full teams developed around them, two issues we are now trying to fix.
#3-8, #agenda, #release-lead
